A Walk In The Woods
by Cranberriez
Summary: A certain Mr. Bellamy is out with some friends, and he decides to go for a walk in the woods. This story only contains one chapter from my brain, the rest is going to come from you. Look to the bottom of the chapter for more info... :D


_Before you read, I would like to apologize in the humblest of terms for my ridiculous sentence lengths in this entry. When I get particularly agitated or particularly thoughtful I tend to write my thoughts as they happen, which then leads to sentences that are so long that by the end of them you've forgotten what happened at the beginning and therefore they lose all meaning. Good lord, I'm doing it now. I'm sorry. Do carry on. _

_~Matthew_

Lying in the park on a picnic blanket in the middle of summer with the roaring heat of the sun beating down on my already burnt neck and flies buzzing around everywhere and children screaming and laughing and crying and distracting me from my book and my sandwich isn't my idea of a perfect afternoon.

Of course, it's perfect if you're a _couple; _wouldn't it just be wonderful to be an effing _couple, _to lie in the park on a picnic blanket in the middle of summer etc. etc. with someone you 'loved'? Hmm.

I sniffed, glancing over at them all, snogging and laughing and talking and just generally being rather happy. It was utterly disgusting. There were four pairs of so-called lovers taking up room on this blanket, and it was driving me mad.

"Cheer up, Matty." One of them said. I raised an eyebrow, and made an attempt at reading another goddamn sentence of my book.

"Look, Matt, why don't you come and talk to someone?" A different voice joined in. I didn't like this; if people are talking to me it usually means they're paying attention to me, which is very likely to lead on to them looking at me. And I despise it when people look at me.

I huffed and rolled on to my back, giving up on the book and throwing an arm over my face to shield me from the sun and the flies and the _couples_.

"Just leave him. He likes being on his own." A third voice entered the conversation, and I sent a silent prayer of thanks to whoever it was that knew me well enough to tell when I wasn't in the mood for a chat. But then the voice spoke again, "Fucking weirdo," and I whisked back my mental thanks quicker than a quick thing doing something very quickly.

I was aware enough of what was going on around me to know that the conversation had moved on from the 'fucking weirdo' for now, so I cracked one eye open and scouted about in hope of finding a patch of shade now the sun had moved across the sky a little. There was plenty of shade under the trees in the wood about thirty metres away, but the ground would be wet under there and as much as I didn't want to talk to anybody here, I didn't fancy sitting on my own under a tree with a wet arse and plenty of strange looks from passers-by to deal with. No: I was staying put, for now.

I propped myself up on my elbows and squinted around the park, searching for some kind of entertainment in the form of people-watching. There were millions of families bustling about near the playground, and a few people out walking their dogs or running along the path with headphones firmly jammed into their ears. And of course there were the _couples,_ old and young, here for a romantic (pfft) outing or off to fuck each other senseless in the woods, I couldn't give a toss. But that was it. There was nobody else. Everybody I could see fit into those three categories: family, _couples_ and exerciser-er…ers. Some of them fit into more than one, which is completely absurd and more than worth raising an eyebrow at.

It soon dawned on me that I was the only person not to have a specific reason to be here. Even the 'friends' I had come with all fit into one of those categories (three guesses which blooming one), so I was on my own. I had no ipod, no dog, no running shoes, no girlfriend, no... er… boyfriend… and certainly no children. I was on my own. I raised my eyebrows as I came to this conclusion, and then I suddenly snapped out of my omniscient daydream to realise that I'd managed to kill a whole ten minutes whilst thinking about this.

If only I could lose myself in the lives of other, more interesting people without having to be there myself. That's kind of what gods do, though, isn't it? Wouldn't it be utterly magnificent to _be_ a god? What would I be… the god of cynicism? That fits.

I was just about to get into another ten-minute long daydream (and it would've been a good one, as well), when somebody quite close was calling my name and thrusting a few five pound notes into my hand.

"It's your turn to buy the ice creams, Matty!" They said, but as soon as I'd focused my eyes properly to see exactly who it was, they were all back to their kissing and canoodling and general innocent yet very intentional foreplay for whatever they were going to get up to later on that evening. I realised that among the five pound notes was a scrap of paper- the scrap of paper I'd been using for a bookmark- with several various different types of ice cream written on it. So they'd placed their orders; now it was up to me to go and buy them a cone full of sugar and fat which they would no doubt be feeding to each other and licking off each other's noses and so forth. Well, it was their money. I wrinkled up my nose and began to raise my bony bum off of the ground.

The ice cream van was right next to the playground, and the queue was at least twenty families long. I wasn't going to waste my time standing there with the money getting all sweaty and stinky in my hand, trying to endure the sheer blare of noise coming from the children whilst I waited to buy some ice cream that wasn't even for me. So I pocketed the money, telling myself that I'd buy the ice creams when the queue was shorter (although also reminding myself that my 'friends' would probably be so busy with each other that they'd forget the ice creams and therefore the money, so I'd probably get away with nicking it), and decided to head for the woods on _this_ side of the park.

As I passed the perimeter fence of the playground on my way I did that thing where you purposely don't look at something. I didn't want any of the kids pulling faces at me or shouting at me and I definitely didn't want to catch the mothers' (or worse, fathers') eyes and have that embarrassing moment where you both look away and pretend you didn't notice that you were looking at each other even if you knew you were. No, I looked straight ahead towards the trees and the shade they provided, thinking about how utterly blissful it would be once I got there.

I noticed a small trail leading into the woods, and I decided to follow it. It definitely wouldn't be a good idea to get lost, considering I had no way of getting home on my own; I was relying on scabbing a lift off of one half of one of the blooming couples. There were a lot of o's and f's in the second half of that sentence.

I must say, the contrast between the burning sun on the field and the damp shade in the woods was astonishing. It felt like I had walked into a broken fridge. I say broken because it wasn't necessarily _cold_, just pleasantly cool. And also because the crunching of branches under my feet could pass for the crunching of broken plastic that you might find in a broken fridge. I put a lot of imagination into these similes, you know.

Even though these woods were on the road side of the park- and indeed I could see the metal railings and the pavement outside them if I squinted through the branches- it seemed much more peaceful here than in the woods by the picnic blanket. But then I remembered that I hadn't actually _been_ in those woods, I'd simply imagined being in the shade of them, so I now feel a bit of a plonk for writing that. What an utter waste of a paragraph.

There didn't seem to be any living creatures in these woods. I couldn't hear any bird song, or scuffling of small mammals or small children. The trees seemed to have blanked out the noise of the playground, as well, even though they weren't very densely packed. I was trundling along the little trail I'd found, looking around in a sarcastic sort of way (when you're Matthew James Bellamy there _is_ no other way to look around), when I did at last hear footsteps. They didn't seem fast or light enough to belong to children, and there were no voices coming from ahead so I concluded that they belonged to somebody who was, like me, walking through the woods on their own.

Well, I had no problem with that.

* * *

><p><em>Okay! This is where our lovely Mr. Bellamy stops his narrative and Lou starts writing (for the first time… ever?) in the actual story bit thingy! So yeah. This is how this is going to work, guys. (By the way, inspiration for this idea came from NewBornBaby's 'You're in the Jungle, Baby!' thing which I <em>still_ haven't finished my chapter for. I _am_ a lazy bum.)_

_You are all going to decide what happens next. But no, you don't write it yourselves, you simply give me the idea and I shall produce a 'next chapter'. Of course, I am completely okay with people who reeeeeeeeeeeally want to carry on the story themselves, but please remember to tell people that the original idea wasn't yours. Just a bit of copyrighting right there._

_So yes. If you want to take part in this ridiculous idea, please PM me with your plot threads for chapter 2, or even a bit of text or simply a few words that you want in there, and I shall produce the goods as quickly as I can (which… um… probably won't be very quickly. You know what I'm like.) _

_This is taking far too long to explain. If you're going to PM me, put the title of this story in the subject line or do something to make it obvious what the message is about, and I will message you back, telling you what letter your chapter 2 idea will be. This story is going to be like a tree, with one chapter 1, then a few branches as chapter 2a, 2b, 2c etc. for each different idea you give me, then from each of those ideas will come chapter 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d, 3e, until there are millions and millions of alternate endings and who knows what might happen! _

_Is this making any sense? Oh dear._

_Of course, if you are mightily confused about all of this but would like to give it a go anyway, don't be afraid to simply ask me what the hell I'm on about. I will try my best to explain._

_I've written far too much now. Yeah. Any questions, please PM me, and it's okay to send more than one idea or make your ideas really warped and crazy and weird. I'll love them all :)_

_So, who do the footsteps belong to? Is Matthew going to keep going on about the goddamned couples? Or is he going to be magicked to Belgium and be attacked by rainbow ponies with swords? Will it be a ghost story, a love story, a comedy? You decide… ;)_

_Cranberriez xxx_


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